littlebear got me that little guy, and for the last year I've been carrying it with me all the time, and use it almost every day. I've had to send it back home from the security line at the airport three times now, but it's totally worth it. (At least I wasn't carrying my AK-47 bayonet, which is so heavy and dull it would probably just give you a nasty bruise if you were hit with it.)

I ogle the Leatherman wall every time we're at REI. I think I need one.

Oh, that's nice. I like those, but I prefer slim, flat knives that I can clip inside my pocket.

Let's see... My old knife, now beat up and retired, was this:

I have a non-black version kicking around somewhere too...

The replacement is this:

...which is less slim and generally a less-elegant design, but also a bit more reliable over time, I think.

At work I have an old-school original Leatherman Super Tool:

I've had that since they came out, 1994 or 1995. My father gave it to me for Christmas one year, and the box was covered with bloody fingerprints where he'd opened it and cut himself messing with it. It's the personal touch that means the most. The pliers are seriously uncomfortable to use since you end up squishing your hand onto the edges of the long bits.

I have a newer SOG tool I keep around at home, and for a while I was buying job lots of pocket tools that had been confiscated at airports and reselling them at a flea market. I could buy 30 or 40 tools for 25 bucks and resell them at 2 bucks each. One of the lots included, amazingly, a Leatherman Flair:

Yep, it's an actual usable corkscrew on a pocket tool! And a cocktail fork! And a caviar spreader! It's truly the least manly of pocket tools, and was worth about 4 times what I paid for the whole box o' tools at the time. Score!

So anyway, yeah, I like knives, but not fetishistically. They're useful.

When I was little I had a fort in the "wilderness" by the freeway. Once my friend and I went there and there was a bunch of stuff there that wasn't ours, including nunchucks. My friend and I took the nunchucks. I wonder if he still has them.

Let me TELL you, it was 1983, and I was 11 years old and I knew me some obscure French pole-arms, I did! And finally Krull was out on VHS, and by GOD we were going to WATCH THAT MOVIE!

So the guy runs around and then he's all "We must find THE GLAIVE!" and I was like "Whoa yeah, he's gonna have some massive blade on a stick, baby! This is gonna be AWESOME!" And then it's some half-assed spiky boomerang deal and I was like "Wait what?" The movie was RUINED FOR ME! Even the squeezy vagina corridor was no fun after that. :(

And now everyone thinks that a glaive is some kind of sci-fi goofiness, rather than a GIANT FRIGGIN BLADE ON A STICK with EXTRA POKEY BITS ON THE BACK. And it makes me sad and causes occasional pedantic rants, which I'm sure nobody wants, but which you must endure anyway.

Oh yeah, I got my chef's knives (which are decent heavy slabs of Henckels steel) from my ex-wife upon parting. She bought them and then couldn't get the glue from the packaging off of them without leaving some tiny mark, so she returned them to the company and they sent her another pair of knives as a replacement in the same packaging. So she cursed a lot and put them in a drawer.

When we split, she offered me the knives, but said it was bad luck to give people knives, so she made me give her a penny for them. It was a good deal.

Yeah, no one will take you seriously if you've only got a knife. Handguns have largely ceased to impress me given the number of people who stash them in their purses, under their seats, etc. Trebuchets and ninja stars, though.... There's potential there.